The price statistics team at ESCWA has been working towards enhancing member states’ capacities through the development of various innovative initiatives. In its latest initiative, ESCWA’s Statistics Division developed a training course for capacity building on price statistics, focusing on the ICP, purchasing power parities (PPPs) and their various uses especially in SDG monitoring in addition to the integration between ICP and CPI.
 
The training targeted 13 national price statisticians with no prior knowledge or experience in the ICP and focused on:

A seminar on regional coordination in geospatial information management took place in Doha, on 7 February 2013, on the margins of the Second High-level Forum on GGIM (4-6 Feb. 2013). It aims to discuss the following topics:

(i) The state of geospatial information at a national level in the countries of the region (i.e. National spatial data infrastructure-NSDI);

(ii) Overview on the international/regional cooperation and United Nations Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) initiative; and

This 1st meeting of the Regional Coordination Mechanism (RCM) Working Group (WG) on the 2030 Agenda seeks to take stock of the collective efforts of the different agencies and identify areas for mutual cooperation.  

Since the Millennium Summit in 2000, countries and international agencies have been compiling data to monitor progress towards the MDGs. The availability and quality of the data at the international and national levels is however not the same. The UN Statistical Commission has called attention to the need of reducing these discrepancies, and countries worldwide have pointed out the importance of assessing progress at sub-national levels and better explore national sources.